«This drawing was spat on at the Exhibition in the S. Carlos Theatre in May 1920 / almada», Almada wrote on this still-life, due to the extremely negative reception of this and other drawings he exhibited after returning from Paris, where he had stayed between January 1919 and April 1920. This episode recalls the scandal provoked by another exhibition, that of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso at the Naval League of Lisbon in December 1916. Both exhibitions were target of the same insults from an equally unprepared public, and received the same harsh critics in the newspaper pages.

 

One critic, whose ‘sensitivity and even […] good mood was completely disturbed’ after visiting the exhibition, held Almada’s art – ‘as everyone knows, a futurist’ – to be that kind of art which ‘at times takes the form of such an impressive and frightening madness that one would say it asks for a straitjacket and a tiny room at the madhouse…’ (newspaper A Capital, May 28, 1920). Another critic considered the drawings only fit for a ‘10 year old child’ or a ‘school boy still learning the rudiments of painting’: he saw them as ‘bloated contortions, extreme stylizations ranging from Picasso’s cubism to the intuitive scribbles of my porter’s son’ (A Capital, May 27, 1920).

 

In the conference Modernism, held November 1926, Almada recalled this episode: ‘To entertain myself I exhibited some drawings made in Paris. And when one morning I entered the exhibition someone had already gone there before me and spat on a handful of originals.’

 

 

 

SAF

 

May 2010